Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness. ~Martin Luther King, Jr.

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Muse’s Monday Menagerie

So the 2008 Baseball Season is off and running! In the summer of 1998, I played the National Anthem in Bank One Ballpark in Phoenix, AR for one of their August games with a group of several hundred flute players. We didn’t get to stay to watch the game; we were just ushered in, played the music, and left. It was an amazing experience. Cool ballpark.

Hillary Rodham Clinton’s cash-strapped presidential campaign has been putting off paying hundreds of bills for months — freeing up cash for critical media buys but also earning the campaign a reputation as something of a deadbeat in some small-business circles.

A pair of Ohio companies owed more than $25,000 by Clinton for staging events for her campaign are warning others in the tight-knit event production community — and anyone else who will listen — to get their cash upfront when doing business with her. Her campaign, say representatives of the two companies, has stopped returning phone calls and e-mails seeking payment of outstanding invoices. One even got no response from a certified letter.

History may not repeat itself, but, as Mark Twain observed, it can sometimes rhyme. The crises and conflicts of the past recur, recognisably similar even when altered by new conditions. At present, a race for the world’s resources is underway that resembles the Great Game that was played in the decades leading up to the First World War. Now, as then, the most coveted prize is oil and the risk is that as the contest heats up it will not always be peaceful. But this is no simple rerun of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Today, there are powerful new players and it is not only oil that is at stake.

The Bosnian girl who famously read a poem to Hillary Rodham Clinton during her 1996 visit to the war-torn country is shocked – and her countrymen infuriated – that the former first lady claimed to have dodged sniper fire that day.

Emina Bicakcic, now 20 and studying to become a doctor, told The Post she stood on the tarmac at the air base in Tuzla, greeted Clinton and even had time to share the lines of verse she’d written – all without fear of attack from an unseen enemy.

(You had to know it was only a matter of time before someone would hunt her down and get her side of the story…)

Will these superdelegates come out of the political closet? Mike Lux at Open Left, on fearful superdelegates who want support Obama but would prefer to not publicly declare lest they piss the Clinton machine off:

There are plenty of people in the Democratic Party who think Hillary Clinton would make a better President, and/or a better general election candidate, than Barack Obama. There are also some folks who endorsed Hillary early on, and believe you have to stick with the candidate you endorse until the bitter end. There are even a few, although the number is shrinking daily, who still have not genuinely made up their mind. And some superdelegates in the remaining states want to wait for the voters in their own state to vote before they declare. But there are very few people I talk to who think Hillary can win without an utterly divisive fight that will likely tear the party apart. They know that from the perspective of what’s best for the party, it’s time to endorse Obama.What those remaining undeclared folks are telling me in private, though, is that they hope the race will play itself out and Obama will emerge as the clear winner so that they don’t have to piss the Clintons and their machine off.

They don’t want the Clintons and McAuliffe and those donors who signed the letter to stop raising money for them. They don’t want Carville and Wolfson to call them a traitor. They don’t want all the behind-the-scenes trashing that they know will come.

I am encouraging my friends to come out of their political closet. If all the superdelegates and other influential friends that I have talked to who believe that the best path for the party is for Obama to win a clear victory would come out in is favor, this thing really would be over.

So, perhaps THIS is why James Carville came out so strong, stooping to likening Bill Richardson to Judas (from the bible, who betrayed Jesus – Is Bill or Hillary Jesus in this scenario..?) for putting his support behind Barack Obama? Even when asked if he wanted to retract his statement on CNN, he made it again, only stronger? On that same CNN interview, Carville also wondered aloud about the ’30 pieces of silver’ that Richardson would receive for his endorsement of Obama.. Was the message not so much for Richardson, but for the rest of the super-delegates out there?

“I haven’t gotten into the gutter on this. And you know, I’m not going to stoop to Carville’s level.

“I think loyalty to the nation, loyalty to the party is a lot more important than personal loyalty,” he said. “I owe the Clintons a lot. I served in the president’s cabinet. That loyalty is to President Clinton. That doesn’t mean that I’m going to for the rest of my life be in lockstep with whatever they do.“

That decision by the D.C. Court of Appeals in Rep. William Jefferson’s (D-LA) case found that Constitutional protections meant that the feds could only search a Congressional office if the lawmaker were provided advance notice and the right to review materials.

Because of the apparent strength of the feds’ case against Jefferson, the decision is not likely to strike much of a blow there. But prosecutors and watchdogs were dismayed with a ruling that was a definite blow to public corruption prosecutions in general. The Justice Department had argued in its request for an appeal that that the decision “‘threatens to complicate numerous ongoing and future investigations’ and hinder the ability to use electronic surveillance” as a means of investigating lawmakers.

Anyone who has worked in a large organization – or, for that matter, reads the comic strip “Dilbert” – is familiar with the “org chart” strategy. To hide their lack of any actual ideas about what to do, managers sometimes make a big show of rearranging the boxes and lines that say who reports to whom.

You now understand the principle behind the Bush administration’s new proposal for financial reform, which will be formally announced today: it’s all about creating the appearance of responding to the current crisis, without actually doing anything substantive.